Today I had a little discussion with a coworker on how to defend ourselves from the horrors of ‘management’. The night before I got inspired watching a great session by Peter Provost at the ALM Summit 2011. As a developer, he states, in the agile world we are on the defensive side. You find the product owner on the offense always wanting things. How do we get ourselves in the position to safely say yes to the product owner? And how can we still be able to take responsibility for the design of our codebase so we can embrace change?

This session is all about the day to day agile reality, test driven design, definition of done, pair programming, refactoring on demand and ownership of the code. Peter switches between the positions of the product owner and the developer.

“Developers are craftsmen… kinda like artists.
Testers are art critics… and nobody likes art critics.”

He ends the session with some of the new agile features in Visual Studio 2011. Highly recommended watch and often a good laugh too.